Russia

Orthodox yes-men

THE upper echelons of the Russian Orthodox Church have long managed to combine the worst aspects of the post-Communist era (Russian chauvinism and shady business practices) with the worst of the old (conspiratorial secrecy and an unhealthy complicity with government). But the church, it seems, is unbothered by this image. At the latest council of bishops, held every two years in Moscow, burly men in mafia-mauve jackets with badges marked “security” on their shoulders made sure that prying journalists were kept well away from the assembled 133 prelates.

Cosying up to authority has its merits: the council avoided making decisions on a range of issues that could have got the church into trouble. Should it canonise the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family? Should it withdraw from the World Council of Churches, that western bastion of squishy ecumenism? A lot of priests—and a lot of ordinary Russians—would cheer both moves. But the church's leaders, deferring to Russia's secular bosses, are wary of being too overtly pro-monarchist and even warier of isolating the church abroad. Wait and see, the bishops therefore declared.

In the new post-Soviet order, the Orthodox Church's patriarch, Alexy II, plays the role, familiar to Eastern Europeans, of the former Communist Party leader who has reinvented himself as a cautious “centrist” and “father of the nation.” He is big friends both with Russia's president, Boris Yeltsin, and with Moscow's powerful mayor (and a leading would-be president), Yuri Luzhkov, with whom he has worked closely in re-building a mammoth symbol of tsarist splendour, Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The original was destroyed by Stalin, who ended up replacing it with an open-air swimming pool.

The patriarch, appointed in 1990, has avoided purging the church's top decision-making body, the Holy Synod, even though archives unearthed after communism's fall show that two of its seven members were close to the KGB. Indeed, Alexy himself provided the security services with information, under the codename “Drozdov” (Thrush).

The only firm step taken by the bishops' council was to squash internal dissent more thoroughly. This year's bishops' council voted to excommunicate Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, who has set up a schismatic church in Ukraine—one of several that now battle for that nation's souls. It has also excommunicated a former dissident and labour-camp inmate, Father Gleb Yakunin, who joined Filaret's church and who has annoyed the Orthodox establishment for years by calling on its leaders to repent of their past KGB allegiances.

If Alexy is the soggy centrist, then Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad fits another post-Soviet role, that of the man once tipped as a “reformer” who now displays authoritarian leanings. The youngest and most dynamic member of the ruling synod, Kirill has become the army's favourite man of God, even blessing Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces. Yet more controversially, as head of the church's external relations department (the Orthodox foreign office—and in Soviet times an arm of foreign and security policy), Kirill has enabled the church to benefit from government tax-breaks to import vast amounts of tobacco and alcohol. Any suggestion of impropriety in this respect was briskly brushed aside at the council.

The instincts of the Orthodox hierarchy to resist change and support the worldly and powerful are nothing new. The church was a pillar of the tsarist state, hounding pre-revolutionary dissenters such as Leo Tolstoy. The faithful, on the whole, have always accepted unquestioningly what the hierarchy says.

No longer is there a formal relationship between church and state. The constitution assigns no official status to the Orthodox Church. But each thinks it worth propping the other up. It is now de rigeur for Russia's secular leaders, most of them former atheists from the heart of the old Communist Party, to attend Easter and Christmas services. In turn, most of them quietly—sometimes not so quietly—support the church in its struggle against Western evangelisers. Many local governments have enacted laws that bluntly discriminate against, and sometimes even virtually outlaw, non-Orthodox missionaries. The regional governor of Tula, for instance, told a Seventh Day Adventist pastor that if he wanted to rent a lecture-theatre for worship he should ask permission of the local Orthodox priest.

Some of the few liberal-minded priests in the church fear these trends will lead to an established church of beautiful but empty symbolism to the detriment of other things the church should be doing, such as charity and education. Though Moscow alone now has 298 “working” churches, few have big congregations. A popular priest who tends a thriving Moscow parish with a young congregation says that the church risks becoming a “national museum”. “Most priests passionately want to keep the church a ghetto for preserving antiquity,” he sighs.

He may be right. Though most Russians still regard the church as “vital”, it is displaying the sort of symptoms of decay long visible among Protestant and Catholic churches in the West. According to a recent opinion poll, ten times the number of Russians support the Orthodox Church as actually attend its services. Given the hostility to religion during the Soviet era, the rush to embrace it after communism fell was remarkable. But now, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, attendance at services is barely higher than in western Europe.